• Performance
• AI
• Robie
• GPT

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Natural Performances with Artificial Intelligence

Using GPT for Scenes, Imagery, Focal Points and Emotion

Paper by Jonathan Robie and Discussion on Zoom

Thursday January 9, 2025

2pm Central Time

Join us for presentation and discussion of Jonathan Robie's "Natural Performances with Artificial Intelligence: Using GPT for Scenes, Imagery, Focal Points and Emotion" on Zoom on Thursday January 9, 2025 at 2pm Central Time. A performer embodies the text, using voice and gesture to convey emotional flow, imagery, relationships in time and space, and other aspects of the text. Accuracy requires detailed, careful analysis of the text. The performer must study, imagine, and internalize these relationships. This presentation uses GPT (systems like ChatGPT) to prepare a Psalm for performance by: 1. Dividing the Psalm into distinct scenes. 2. Highlighting key imagery within each scene. 3. Mapping the emotional progression throughout the Psalm. 4. Creating questions to aid deeper understanding and internalization. We use a GPT framework to analyze biblical texts in Hebrew or Greek. A user can specify an analysis and the desired output structure, applying it to a set of passages. It is easy to try out new analyses, weeding out unhelpful ones and applying useful analyses to other texts. The analyses mentioned above can be found here for each of the Psalms: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JHHwtbKeFeOmHl0-wxOFqE_5W9DgmpbWiYWtn0QBqFM/edit?usp=sharing Emotional Flow uses a model of emotion closely related to "heart" in both Greek and Hebrew, based loosely on Martha Nussbaum's "Upheavals of Thought." Emotion enriches our relationships with God and others, guiding us in situations beyond our control and understanding, and helping flourish. These GPT-based analyses surprised us. They reveal deeply human aspects of biblical texts, offering multiple perspectives to help performers internalize and embody the text. We end the presentation by doing an oral performance of the Psalm based on these analyses.

Register for the Zoom meeting at https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwtf-GrrDgqE9EIv89WtgqPrgdk9AtsEcA_

• Galatians
• Detextification

Oral Performance and the Veil of Text

Detextification, Paul's Letters, and the Test Case of Galatians 2-3

by Ben F. van Veen

(Pickwick, 2024)

It is now common opinion that the biblical documents functioned in an oral context dominated by the spoken word. The present study centres on the letters of Paul, especially Galatians, and addresses the complex relation between this functioning in the original oral setting and the daily praxis of current biblical scholarship in which these documents function as autonomous texts, detached from the context of its original oral delivery. It will be argued that in addition to the difference in media (oral performance there-and-then versus reading the text here-and-now) it is crucial to differentiate the mindsets involved. A highly literate reader in the present structures thought differently from someone in the past who is formed by oral-aural communication. The leading question of this investigation is: How can a biblical scholar here-and-now relate to the text of the letters of Paul (in a printed or digital version) in such a way that he or she can understand (in the typically accompanying highly literate mindset) how the apostle envisioned his original addressees to understand (in their rather unfamiliar oral mindset) the documented words in the event of delivery? It is argued that by textualizing history and historicizing text a detextification of our understanding of these ancient documents is possible. Two testcases of detextification are provided, viz. Gal 3.10-12, in which the presence of a self-evident and simple enthymematic (syllogistic) reasoning is put to the test, and Gal 2.18-20, in which it is argued that Paul counters the call to circumcision by his opponents by a recalling of the baptism of the Galatian converts.